(Speaker: day eighty-eight. the memory-eater is on the west road and he does not haggle. bring exact change.)
the strider stood on the west road with its legs folded under it, and it did not smell of anything at all.
that was the part kael could not get past. he came along the wall to where she was standing with his nostrils working, and kept them working, up the road and down it, and found nothing, and started again.
"nothing," he said. "not sweat. not leather. not rot. a thing that size should have weather on it."
"he's been sitting there since dusk."
"i know he has. i can see him." kael's ears were flat against his skull. "i don't like being told a thing exists by my eyes."
neither do i, she thought, and went to get her sandals.
sivan caught her at the gate and did not try to stop her, which was worse.
"he eats what you give him," they said. "he cannot take. that is the whole of what i know and it is not enough for me to be calm about."
"i know."
"then say the other part out loud so i have heard you say it."
"i am going out alone to trade with a thing that eats memory, at night, and i decided it by myself." she pulled the strap tight. "chalo. i'd rather be the one who says it than have vek say it in the morning."
kael came down to the gate with her and she stopped him on the threshold.
"here," she said.
"ten paces. ten paces isn't escort."
"it's the west road, and you're grove-only until your ten days are worked, and that's the machine's ruling, not mine. here. and it goes in the book tonight that i ordered you to stop, so that when this gets argued about — and it will — nobody has to guess whether you disobeyed me."
he stopped at the gate. she walked fifty paces alone and felt him standing there the whole time, a banked fire at her back on a road with no weather on it.
whisper was sitting on the strider's folded knee with his hands laced together. too many fingers, laced badly, like a knot somebody had given up on.
"fulcrum," he said. "you came out."
"i haven't said i'm buying."
"you came out." the buzz under the words went warm. "same thing. cheaper for us both if we skip the part where you are careful."
"what have you got."
"numbers." the mask tilted. circuit-board and bone, and the eyes behind it did not catch the moonlight the way eyes do. "the red arm. what he has. what is his, what is borrowed, and when the borrowing ends." a pause exactly long enough. "that last one is the good part."
meera kept her hands still.
"price."
"one memory."
"i thought that was your price for the seed."
"prices are not for things. prices are for hunger." the fingers unlaced. "one memory. good one."
"no."
"good one."
"i'll give you a bad one," she said. "the night the hollow burned. all of it — the smoke, the sound the roof made, the three days after. that's true and it's whole and it's the worst thing i own after one other, and you can have it tonight."
the mask tilted the other way. bird-tilt. a thing considering a seed on a wire.
"no."
"you eat bitter. you told me you eat bitter. you said you liked it."
"i love bitter." he said it with feeling, which was the most unpleasant thing that had happened so far. "i eat bitter every day. i walk the dust of dead things, fulcrum. bitter is the ground where i come from. you are offering me dirt and asking me to call it dinner."
"then i don't understand your price."
"no." he sounded delighted. "you don't."
he unfolded one arm and put a finger — long, jointed twice where it should have jointed once — very near her jaw. not touching. she made herself not move.
"the hollow burning, you would be glad to hand me. you would sleep better. you have wanted somebody to take it off you for three years." the finger withdrew. "a price the payer wants to pay is not a price. it is a gift with a bill on it. i am not a charity and you are not a customer i respect yet."
"and a good one?"
"a good one does not stay good." the buzz dropped low and satisfied. "you keep it, you lose it, and then you spend twenty years reaching for a thing that is not there, and every time your hand closes on nothing — " a small noise, almost a hum — "that is bitter. that is the best bitter there is. it makes itself. forever. one good memory feeds me longer than every burning house you own."
the road was very quiet. back at the gate, kael was holding his breath. she could feel him doing it, down the bond, the way you feel a door held open in a draught.
"and the seed," she said.
"not this moon."
"i need it more than i did."
"i know. that is why it is not this moon." the mask did not move at all. "numbers are cheap, fulcrum. numbers are only numbers. the seed is on a different shelf and you are not tall enough for that shelf yet."
she stood on the road and picked through everything good she had, which took less time than she wanted it to.
then she chose.
"the first mango of the year," she said. "in my mother's kitchen. she wouldn't let me carry it to the table because i dripped, so i ate it standing over the sink, and she stood in the doorway and laughed at me for it. that's the one."
whisper was still for a long moment.
"oh," he said. "yes. that. yes."
"take it."
it did not hurt. that was the thing nobody warns you about. there was a coldness near her jaw and a sound like a page being turned in another room, and then it was over, and the night was the same night.
she reached for it immediately, standing there, because she had to know.
the kitchen was there. the sink was there. the shape of her mother in the doorway was there, and the laugh, and the word she used when she was laughing at somebody she loved.
there was no taste in any of it.
she could recite every fact of it. she could have drawn the room. she reached for the one thing the whole memory had been built around, and her hand closed on nothing, exactly as advertised.
and standing on the road with her mouth full of no flavour at all, she finally understood what she had refused two moons ago, in front of this same folded strider, when he had offered to hide all of them from the sky.
she had thought selling the betrayal meant forgetting it. she had said so out loud — that she might trust the wrong person again, that she might get her pack killed.
but she would have kept every fact of mahi. every one. the road, the safe passage, the five weapons, the exact shape of his mouth when he said her name to somebody else.
she would only have lost how much it still hurt.
two moons. she had been carrying the hurt on purpose for two moons and calling it armour, and it had not been armour. it had been a habit she was proud of.
"you are angry," whisper observed, pleased.
"i'm educated."
"same flavour, better texture." the strider began to unfold itself, joint by joint, like a hand opening. "here. numbers."
what he gave her was not paper. hide, scraped thin, folded four times, and it smelled — she got it before she opened it — of somebody else's smoke and somebody else's horses.
"one more thing, free," he said, from up on the strider's shoulder, already turning. "the stoneback. grom. he is alive, three hundred miles west, and he is still telling people about the human who clasped arms with a stoneback like an equal."
she had to put her hand on the strider's cold leg for a second after that one.
then the strider walked off into the dark, and it made no sound either.
(Speaker: congratulations. you now own a piece of hide that smells like other people's horses.)
she did not open it alone, and she did not open it until she had slept. she took it into the long room at dusk with arin and sarika and thorn and vek, and unfolded it on the table, and it was not numbers.
it was names.
"he said numbers," she said.
"he said numbers," arin agreed, already counting down the column with his finger, lips moving. "these are numbers. nine war-bands. four are his own. five are borrowed and there's a — " his finger stopped. "there's a season written next to each borrowed one. that's when they go home."
"that's the good part," meera said. "he told me that was the good part."
"alpha, this is — " arin caught himself. "this is very good. this is better than good, this is when."
but thorn had gone quiet in a way that changed the smell of the room. not fear. something with more iron in it. he had both hands flat on the table and he was looking at the top line and he had not blinked in a while.
"i know that name," he said.
"we all know that name."
"no." thorn put one finger on it, carefully, as if it might still be hot. "i mean i know it from underneath. he had four hundred men and i was one of them and he knew my face. he gave me my knife." he swallowed. "he'd have known my name off this list if it went the other way round."
nobody said anything.
then thorn's finger went down the column, and stopped, and went down again, and stopped.
"these four."
"thorn—"
"i dug latrines with these four." his voice did not rise. that was somehow worse. "this one had a sister he wouldn't shut up about. this one couldn't sleep unless there was a wall on his left. none of them wanted to be there. none of them could go. same as me, and i went, and they didn't, and i have been putting them in the ground in my head since the pyres."
he took his hand off the hide as if it had become unpleasant.
"i have been saying prayers over men who are still eating."
what he asked for, he asked for badly, twice, and then got it out.
"send them word. that's all. that there's a door here. skarn's got a man on a horse at every new moon telling my people there's a road west — " thorn's jaw worked. "there's a road east too and nobody's ever told them."
sarika did not say no. sarika never says no. sarika says a number.
"thirty-two days," she said. "that's the shelves at today's ration — the first cut came in at half weight after the rains flattened it, and every grain of it is on those shelves, and the main field is still standing green out there."
"a first cut isn't the harvest," vek said, to nobody in particular.
"no. the review waits on the main field. i checked." sarika didn't look at him. "you want to cut a door in a wall with thirty-two days behind it."
"sarika—"
"i'm not finished, and i'm not against it." she folded her arms. "the man on the horse offers a fire that night. i've seen his horse. what does your door offer a man who walks four days and arrives hungry? because from here it looks like you're offering him a queue and an argument about which column he goes in."
it was the question that needed asking and she had earned the asking of it, and meera had spent seven days waiting for somebody to ask it since the two men walked west without their names.
"nothing," meera said. "to a hungry man, nothing. i want that said before i say the rest, because the rest sounds better than it is."
vek looked up.
"i'm not aiming this at hungry men. i'm aiming it at men who spent six years being fed as our own are fed." she put her finger on thorn's four. "vek asked that rider four questions. hours. ration by weight, not adjective. who decides. and is any of it written down. he got nothing, four times, and he stayed. those four questions are the whole offer."
"that's still words," said vek.
"then here's the not-words, and it goes in the ledger tonight so it can be held against me: any man who comes off that road gets entered the same day, by name, at a half share, with kerra's conversion rate on the labour-days read out to him at the gate before he agrees to anything. the same rate that's been in kerra's book since before your nine came in, from the day she costed my eight." she looked at sarika. "not a promise about a harvest. a number he can hold me to on the day he arrives."
sarika thought about it for a while.
"that'll move some of them," she said. "not the hungry ones."
"no."
"and it doesn't fix the sums."
"no. it doesn't fix the sums." meera got that out before vek could, which she suspected he noticed. "that's still sitting on me and it's going to keep sitting there."
vek shut his mouth. she had never seen him do that before and did not know what to do with it.
the ruling took four minutes and it went by name, to council, with kerra writing.
"you don't carry it," she said to thorn.
"it's mine to—"
"it's yours and you don't carry it. he had four hundred men and he knew your face." she waited exactly as long as that needed. "you are the one he gets to hang off a pole with a sign on it to make a point to the other eight war-bands. you are worth more to him than the message is to us."
thorn looked at the table for a moment and then nodded once, and that was the closest thing to a mercy she could give him.
then she turned to zira, and did not give her an order.
"i wrote something down about you after the full moon," meera said. "that you're the best scout in this settlement and i've been using you as a spear. it's in kerra's book where anybody can read it, so i'm not going to tell you to go."
zira's wing shifted.
"i'm asking. it's four days out and four back and it's scouting, not fighting. you're better at it than anyone i have. and you can say no to me right here in front of all of them and nothing happens to you afterwards — not a look, not a tier, nothing."
zira studied the ceiling of the long room for an unhurried length of time.
"first light," she said. "not tonight. i don't fly dark."
"first light."
"she's gone over the moon," arin said. "four days of paper walls, last time, and she was the one on the west parapet."
"i know. rion has the wall." meera did not look away from zira. "that's my cost, not hers."
"and i drop it. i don't land. i've watched a man wait to be invited at forty feet. i'm not landing in a war camp to be polite."
kerra, who had been standing there with the book open through all of it, had already made her own decision about the other thing.
"i'm putting the memory in the second column," she said. "under alpha's own debt. i haven't got a unit for it, so i'm inventing one — one good memory, the facts left, the rest unrecoverable. if it happens again i'll number them."
"kerra—"
"you paid something for that list, alpha." sixteen years old, and the chalk did not move. "if it isn't written down it didn't cost anything, and then next time it's cheaper."
zira went at first light, off the parapet and west, and was a shape and then a mark and then nothing.
tarak came and stood in the gateway with his hand wrapped round two of meera's fingers and watched the sky where she had stopped being.
"is she taking a letter?"
"a list."
"of what?"
"of people who might still be able to leave."
tarak thought about that with his whole face, the way he thinks about everything.
"like us," he said.
meera stayed in the gate a while after the sky was empty. she had just sent a rider west at a man who sends riders east, and she had not decided yet — standing there with a kitchen in her head that had no taste left in it and thirty-two days of grain behind her — whether that made her his equal or his student.